TIMES RECORD • December 31, 2021
At the center of my life with lands, both real and written, walks Henry Thoreau. EB White once wrote that each of us finds a “lifetime book,” a volume that is at the core of who we are and to which we return with a homing instinct. “Every [one], I think, reads one book in [a] life, and this one is mine,” he wrote of Walden in a 1953 New Yorker piece. “It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest.” White owned and gave away tens of editions of Walden, including a 1964 edition (complete with a rain-shedding duraflex cover) to which he wrote the introduction. I arrived at the same life-book some decades after White, but my life has been no less inflected by it. ~ Sandy Stott